Whether you’re putting together a slide show to display your vacation photos or adding photos of industrial products to a business presentation, PowerPoint has the tools and capabilities you need. And with the new Picture Styles feature in PowerPoint 2007, it has never been easier to give those photos professional-looking frames, shadows, and other effects.

There are two kinds of graphics in the computer world: vector and raster. Vector graphics (clip art, drawn lines and shapes, and so on) are created with mathematical formulas. Some of the advantages of vector graphics are their small file size and the fact that they can be resized without losing any quality.

The main disadvantage of a vector graphic is that it doesn’t look “real.” Even when an expert artist draws a vector graphic, you can still tell that it’s a drawing, not a photograph. For example, perhaps you’ve seen the game The Sims? Those characters and objects are 3-D vector graphics. They look pretty good but there’s no way you would mistake them for real people and objects.

In this chapter, you’ll be working with raster graphics. A raster graphic is made up of a very fine grid of individual colored pixels (dots). The grid is sometimes called a bitmap. Each pixel has a unique numeric value representing its color. Figure 24-35 shows a close-up of a raster image. You can create raster graphics from scratch with a “paint” program on a computer, but a more common way to acquire a raster graphic is by using a scanner or digital camera as an input device.

FIGURE 24-35
A raster graphic, normal size (right) and zoomed in to show individual pixels (left).

Because there are so many individual pixels and each one must be represented numerically, raster graphics are much larger than vector graphics. They take longer to load into the PC’s memory, take up more space when you store them as separate files on disk, and make your PowerPoint presentation file much larger.

You can compress a raster graphic so that it takes up less space on disk, but the quality may suffer. Therefore, it’s best to use vector graphics when you want simple lines, shapes, or cartoons and reserve raster graphics for situations where you need photographic quality.

The following sections explain some of the technical specifications behind raster graphics; you’ll need this information to make the right decisions about the way you capture the images with your scanner or digital camera, and the way you use them in PowerPoint.

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